Gordon Doherty - Assassin's Creed Odyssey - The Official Novelization

The slave stared into space, nodded once, and did as he was told.

Elpenor stepped into his office, well-appointed with busts and plush seats, a hearth on one side and a colonnade on the other, open to the gardens to allow the blissful song of nature to spill inside. Moving over to the black-and-burned-orange krater on the table, he poured himself a cup of wine and chilled water. It slightly disappointed him that the krater was not empty, for it robbed him of a reason to whip the girl whose duty it was to keep his home stocked with fine drinks and foods. “Now, to the business of the day,” he mused to himself, sipping the cool liquid with a contented sigh. He swung on his heel toward the polished-ash-wood bureau where his tokens and tablets waited. But he took just one stride toward it and froze.

A Spartan officer’s helm sat upon the desk, staring back at him, the transverse crimson crest spread like a peacock’s tail. One-half of the helm was gleaming bronze, the other half encrusted in dried blood.

“First, you will pay me,” a voice spoke from the shadows behind the colonnade.

He sucked in a breath, seeing her now. She paced into view, her face dark. She seemed different from that moment on Kephallonia last spring. Leaner, taller, more confident in her stride.

“And then you will tell me why,” she continued in a breathy drawl.

“Why?” Elpenor said.

“Don’t play games with me. You knew when you sent me on that mission. You knew you had sent me to take my father’s head.”

Elpenor beheld her with hooded eyes and a creeping smile. “If you had known, Misthios, would you have taken the contract?” he said, sliding open a drawer under the table and lifting a small sack of coins, never taking his gaze from her. He plunked the coins down on the bureau dismissively.

“I believe some evils are best left undisturbed,” she replied, stalking wide toward the bureau as if wary of a trap.

“Yet once a hornet’s nest has been shaken, the swarm must be faced,” Elpenor said in a conspiratorial whisper. “He wasn’t your real father, was he?”

Kassandra’s lips twitched, betraying a bestial grimace. “You will tell me everything, you snake. Why did you send me to kill him?”

Elpenor shrugged, sinking back onto a cushioned bench with an affected sigh, sipping his wine, stroking a standing marble statue of Ares by the bench’s end, the war god clutching a bronze spear. “The Wolf was a brilliant general. He would have unpicked Athens’s strategies and defenses before long… and there’s no profit in a quick war, is there?”

“How did you know about his past and mine?” Kassandra hissed, taking the coin purse and stepping toward him.

“I love theater. A great general throws his own children from a cliff on the say-so of the Oracle… it is a tragedy for all the ages.” He chuckled.

“You find amusement in the strangest of places,” she said. “Perhaps you will laugh one last time when I sink my spear into your chest?”

“Now, now, Misthios, let me explain.” Elpenor lifted his cup to drink again. His eyes obscured momentarily, he glanced to the colonnade. His eyes met those of a guard, and the guard quickly saw what was going on. Excellent, he thought as the leather-clad brute crept in from the gardens, coming for Kassandra unseen like a leopard stalking a gazelle. “The Wolf told you about your birth father and your mother, I presume?”

She nodded once, staring down her nose at him as she drew close.

“Then it is simple,” he said. “They will be your next two targets.”

She recoiled. “What did you say?”

“You heard me, Misthios. You have proven yourself a parent slayer already. Why the misgivings now?”

“I thought you a soulless cur at first, now I know that you are far worse,” she croaked. “Why, why would I do what you ask?”

“Then the answer is no?” Elpenor said, leaning forward on the bench, eyes wide as if awaiting a revelation.

“Never,” she said through gritted teeth.

“Such a shame, you could have been of use to me,” Elpenor said, then nodded once to the creeping guard behind her.

In a single movement, Kassandra bent around from the hips, drawing, nocking and loosing her bow. The arrow took the guard in the eye just as he lurched in an attempt to run her through. The man flailed and crashed headlong into the unlit hearth, where he lay, feet twitching.

Elpenor snatched the bronze spear from the marble hands of Ares, swishing it around toward her. He heard a clean chopping noise and saw both his hands and the spear spin through the air, Kassandra’s half spear flashing in a shaft of sunlight. He stared at the perfectly hewn stumps below both wrists: white bone, marrow, blood… then lots and lots of blood. He fell to his knees, wailing. “What have you done?”

She clamped a hand over his mouth and pressed him back against the bench. “You will bleed to death in moments. I can save you, but I want answers.”

Elpenor felt fiery agony in his forearms at first, then the hot wetness of the soaking blood. Then… a growing coldness. He nodded weakly; she slid her hand from his lips. “You are a fool, Kassandra. You only left Kephallonia alive because of me. The Cult wanted you dead. I said you would be more use alive.”

Kassandra’s face grew pinched and hateful. “The Cult… who ?”

Elpenor sensed a final victory in the onset of death. He would be her master, at the last, ridiculing her with his dying breath. “Go, as the Wolf once did… and ask the Oracle,” he cackled, before he slipped into a cold black infinity.

Kassandra stumbled back from his graying corpse, numb. Absently, she snatched a few more coin purses from a drawer in his desk, then opened a wooden chest to find a silk robe that would no doubt fetch a good price and a wicked-looking but probably valuable theater mask, taking both. As she crouched to make her escape before any more guards arrived, she saw the slave kneeling by the indoor pool, white with fear, staring at her, having seen it all. She tossed him one of the coin purses. “Go,” she said, “far from this place.”

She heard the slave and the few other poor wretches of the household scampering away toward the docks. She, however, turned inland, toward the rising mountains and the streaming crowds of pilgrims flooding up into those heights. Soon, her thighs ached as she climbed with them, her head bowed, neck scorched by the sun, mind heavy with mysteries. All throughout the past winter, spent hiding out in the islands with Barnabas and his crew, she had rehearsed her confrontation with Elpenor. Now it was over, and she had nothing but a pair of coin sacks and a few fine garments—worthless compared to the answers she needed.

She glanced over her shoulder in the direction of the cur’s villa, behind and far below. Kirrha town was now but a shimmer of activity—the warren of streets and alleys like a tessellated promenade, hugging the green waters of the Korinthian Gulf. Up here the heat was dry and choking, the dust sticking to the back of the throat and stinging the eyes. She felt like a fool: climbing toward Delphi and the Temple of Apollo and its damned Oracle as if she would truly find any answers there. But there was no other way. The Wolf had not told her of her true father or her mother’s whereabouts, and so now it came down to Elpenor’s dying jest and the famously abstruse words of the seeress.

Ikaros shrieked, banking and soaring up above. Kassandra squinted upward. He wheeled and sped across the pale rock and greenery ahead. A wreath of cloud obscured the higher parts, and the heat began to mix with a freshness. Here, a high green valley yawned, the sides veined with streamlets and dotted with pine and cypress trees.